Some people predicted that Ed Miliband would get booed. He didn’t, but in a way, it would have looked better for him if he had. Instead his audience was silent, except for the odd drizzle of applause when they noticed he’d stopped speaking for a moment. If they didn’t like what he was saying, they didn’t say so, or at least not loud enough for him to hear. Perhaps they felt that jeering Mr Miliband would be like jeering the rain. It’s there. You may not like it but there’s not much you can do about it. Might as well just get on with it.

The Labour leader was in Bournemouth to address the Trades Union Congress. “What a pleasure it is to be here today,” he began, unconvincingly. In the past week Mr Miliband has had the pleasure of seeing two of the country’s biggest unions, Unite and GMB, cut their funding to his party. Their leaders are unhappy about Mr Miliband’s proposals for reforming the relationship between Labour and the unions, which, they fear, will give them less influence over party policy and candidate selection.

If he wanted to win them back, he went about it in an unorthodox way, by opening with enthusiastic praise for a Conservative Prime Minister. Not the current one, or even Benjamin Disraeli (the Conservative Prime Minister he praised at party conference last year), but the 14th Earl of Derby, who led the country three times in the mid nineteenth century. The 14th Earl, he said, “first legislated to allow trade unions”, and his name was Edward Stanley – “or, as he would be called today… Red Ed!”

Once the trickle of mirth had subsided, Mr Miliband resumed. If the 14th Earl were alive today, he’d be appalled by David Cameron. David Cameron was a divisive politician, concerned only with the interests of the rich, and ignoring the young and the poor. It was meant to be a serious point, and sounded like one – until, that is, Mr Miliband started talking about the trade unionists’ members.

“David Cameron writes off your members!” cried Mr Miliband. “But your members are the backbone of Britain… Let me just say something about your members… The responsibility of the Labour party is to reach out to your members…”

And so on. Perhaps it was merely the phenomenon by which endless repetition of a word makes it sound amusing, but for some reason I took pleasure in hearing Mr Miliband inform a room of brawny, scowling men how much he admired their members, and how much he needed their members, and how much he wanted to reach out to their members.

The speech concluded to a dribble of applause. On to delegates’ questions. Again, no booing or jeering. But it was noticeable that the more forthright questions (“Can we get a clear answer: are you for or against austerity?”) were greeted with rather noisier approval than anything Mr Miliband had said.